But I still… I was still waiting for this feeling of happiness I suppose to come in, and it didn’t. And then one morning, and it was exactly 7 weeks to the day that I took, you know, the first tablet. I woke up that morning and I just knew that inside myself that I felt different. I’m not, I don’t know that I could describe it, or have the language to describe it, I just know, I knew that morning when I woke up that I feel differently, things are different. And that was the turning point. So I think I’d started medication towards the end of May and this was into July.

It was this lifting again, this lifting of overall and just…. contentedness I think probably, this, it was, back there again, from I don’t now how long ago since I had felt that way. Whether it was a combination of that and the sleep that I just generally began to feel better. And, and physically more well. And happy again. You know, I think I began to laugh out loud again and, and that it was from inside, it wasn’t just a sort of superficial laugh, it was a sort of deep inside laughing.

What’s it like, taking the Efexor?

What was it like, oh, it’s probably the best drug I’ve ever taken.

Why’s that?

Because I don’t feel like I’m out of control. I don’t feel like I’m not being myself. I feel, I.. [sighs] I suppose I feel a little bit more secure in myself. A little bit more in control of myself, more in’ I’m in more of a routine with it. So, you know my sleeping patterns are a lot better, than what they were.

I did get ill on it, I’ve never really been physically sick, but most anti-depressants I’ve taken have made me feel queasy for a couple of weeks. Efexor was a bit different, I felt sort of queasy, a lot less, I was given 75mg to start with. And when I moved to the hospital, they put me up to 150mg.

I’ve taken fluoxetine (Prozac), and Seroxat (paroxetine). With Seroxat the first thing I noticed was, [laughs] this is a bit embarrassing, but I couldn’t ejaculate It’s extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary, so you have no erection problems as such and you can have sex you know, but you just don’t come [laughs]. And it’s kind of a weird’

Is that a good or a bad thing?

Theres a question. You feel like a sort of porn star, you can go for hours you know [laughs]. On the whole I would say it was a bad thing, because you just think whoa, theres something fucked up in my body [laughs], this isn’t the way it was supposed to be. You actually get over it, that lasted about a month, about two or three months I think I can’t remember if you could, yeah because you’ you just can’t you just can’t ejaculate. I’m trying to remember if you can actually orgasm, I can’t remember, I’m not even sure you can actually, no you can’t’You know you can put up with not ejaculating in return for not wanting to die you know.

Well, since I was very little I had occasionally had suicide fantasies. When I was little I used to imagine creeping out of the house at night up to the nearby railway tracks, and that was… that was in a way a comfort for me, because you know sometimes I would feel like my life was completely out of my control, and I didn’t have any options.

But then I would always think I did have another option, I could take my life into my own hands and you know sometimes, sometimes I would feel ignored or unloved, and then I could imagine how people would feel if I did kill myself, and you know, it would remind me that people did love me And for many years I hadn’t had any suicide thoughts at all, and I had certainly never thought of cutting myself, but while I was on Seroxat, I did start to get sudden images in my head of you know, cutting long gashes in myself, and just… just seeing the blood running everywhere and, you know, the feeling of compulsion to do it.

You know, feeling a need to see that, and I did used to get images coming in my head of lying in a blood- filled bath or jumping into a river or off a tall building. And those images would just sit in my head for a long time until they just melted away, and…sometimes they left me feeling a bit disturbed, but usually they didn’t cause any emotions in me.It was like… like my personality had been withdrawn and my rational mind had been overwhelmed, or insulated or cut off in some way and I was just purely running on immediate needs…

Ooh dear, bad news. Being stupidly pig-headed, just stopped it (Efexor) at 300mg and stopped it and that was the, I thought I was going to go mad.

What happened?

I was just completely off my head with depression. I was down in a pit of despair and really quite unstable. And I thought, “What you are doing to yourself, [interviewee name]?” So I just, and I got back on it. And the reason why I know those feelings are really bad is because if I’ if I forgot to put my prescription in, and I would go about a day to 2 days without it, the symptoms would start. About 48 hours of. after stopping the tablet, if I missed a dose, and the and the symptoms were so acute it was very frightening. You feel sick, nausea, the nausea was awful. And just panic, really.

You stopped taking your Lustral, you were angry?

[laughs] Yes, I was remarkably angry, distressed, frustrated. I was very angry with the therapist for being off sick, and I thought, no, I’m not feeling anything. I thought these tablets are stopping me feeling things, I’m just being passive, and I’m coping. So I thought, no, I’m going to stop taking them, and I stopped taking them for a week. And by the end of the week I realised it was a really, really bad idea. You get the fuzzy head. Yeah, I had a week of withdrawal.

And well when you experience those they’re the strangest things ever. When you make a movement, a muscle movement, you get this incredible, uh… it’s not a tingling, you get this incredible buzz in your head. Which is quite bizarre, and that’s the first time I’d really experienced them, so I wasn’t very happy with the physical side effects.

So after a week I thought, ‘That was a really silly idea, I’d better go back on them’, but of course, after even a week the damage is done, because then you’ve got to build back up to the level you were at. So it took me, that probably set me back about five or six months.

But they (Prozac) are working for me and I will keep going with them. She says I can’t get addicted to them and I don’t feel I’m addicted. I had to have the experience of not having them to know that I can’t be without them and that was, in a way, a good thing that we forgot to take them with us because it tells me don’t ever forget to take them again, which I don’t. The first thing I do in the morning is take my tablet.

So as I say, I think that is the one. It is the tablet for me. I feel better on these than I ever felt when I was on Librium, Valium, Amatryptiline. I’ve had so many different antidepressants over the years that this is definitely the one that makes me feel calm all day, and I don’t feel docile like I used to. I used to get zombified sometimes but I don’t on these.

Oh well let’s try stopping the venlafaxine and see what happens, which actually turned out to be extremely, extremely difficult. Again the, the ants under the skin. Really terrible nausea and also sort of perceptual problems that – sort of feeling everything is too far away or it’s too close and feeling off balance.

So I had to go back onto 75mg and then try taking it one pill every other day and then one pill, leaving it as long as I could until the withdrawal symptoms became unbearable and taking another pill and they would go away. And eventually I could kind of get to about one pill every two and a half days.

Really terrible nausea and also motion sickness that I haven’t taken a pill the day before. I’m driving in the car really making me quite nauseous. And then eventually I started to take, you know, I’d take a pill and when the withdrawal symptoms got too bad, I broke it open and I would take half a pill and then again leave it for as long as possible and then take another half pill and eventually I weaned myself off That took a long time.

It took about eight weeks and it was very unpleasant and so there was part of that you know, I started looking on the internet for other people who had effects of withdrawal symptoms’ and actually a lot of people have had effects of withdrawal symptoms and a lot of people are quite pissed off with the makers for not really saying what the withdrawal is like. But you know I got through it.